


Hey, Big Spender

by Mad_Maudlin



Category: Firefly
Genre: Multi, Prostitution
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-01-23
Updated: 2010-01-23
Packaged: 2017-10-06 14:51:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,565
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/54857
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mad_Maudlin/pseuds/Mad_Maudlin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Simon really shouldn't be let off the ship alone.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hey, Big Spender

"Hey there, mister."

"Hey, handsome, _ni zhao shenme?"  
_  
"Need a hand, _xiansheng?"  
_  
Simon was really beginning to regret talking Mal into letting him off the boat.

"Looking for something?" asked the least-painted trollop in the alley. Well, he would call it an alley; the locals probably considered it a main thoroughfare. That had been one of his main arguing points when the captain had decided to go paternal on him. The settlement was too small for the Alliance to concern themselves with, too small to get lost in (and no hill people to kidnap him, this time--he'd checked). There were supplies he needed to buy, and no, he could not just send a list with Jayne--the ape man would probably eat it. Inara and Book would keep an eye on River for him. It was not going to be a disaster this time.

He just hadn't taken into account this affect of the per capita number of prostitutes on his ability to get back on time.

"Yes," he asked the one hanging off a lamppost who had just spoken. "I seem to have gotten a bit lost--" because finding a street relatively whore-free had taken him rather far out of his way-- "could you point me towards the tavern?"

The prostitute smiled lazily, indolently--she had all her teeth (that he could see), which automatically placed her in a higher esteem bracket than most of the women who'd been calling his name all over the street all evening. And afternoon. And a decent slice of the morning as well. Just how early did a woman of the night go to work on this godawful moon? "I might," she said in a scratchy smoker's drawl. "Depends on what we'd be doing when we get there."

He only had the money that Mal had grudgingly handed over, and only after Simon had pointed out the next finger he sewed back on might be the captain's own. What a dilemma--give the captain's money to a hooker or explain why he showed up late? "Um," he stammered, "well--"

"Doc! Hey, doc!"

Simon was pretty sure these were the only circumstances under which he would actually be happy to hear Jayne Cobb's voice. "I must be going," he said to the prostitute (who pouted a little) before turning on his heel and walking as quickly as dignity and his shopping allowed towards the corner where Jayne and Kaylee had appeared, on the end of the street where he had just come from.

It was too much to hope they hadn't realized who he'd been talking to. Jayne looked amused; Kaylee looked rather like she'd bitten off half of a lemon. "What you doing down that side of the street, Doc?" Jayne asked, smirking.

"Asking directions," Simon said woodenly.

"Sure you was."

He turned to Kaylee, wondering if it might be an appropriate time to offer to carry some of her shopping (which looking mostly like scrap metal and hanks of colored wire to him). She turned her back on him and walked away without a word.

The met up with Wash and Zoe and the mule in the square outside the tavern; walked in on them, more like, although neither of them seemed particularly embarassed about it. "What took you so long?" Wash asked as he adjusted his shirt, and even managed to sound vaguely put-out by their tardiness.

"Kaylee got busy looking at wires and Doc here was chatting up some_ biaozi,_" Jayne said. Whatever he'd purchased, he dumped it unceremoniously on the back of the mule with a slightly muffled crash. At least they could be sure it wasn't a load of pressure grenades.

"I was not chatting her up," Simon said as he settled his bags a little more gently on top of Jayne's. "I was asking directions."

"You mean you got lost in this _yang de piyan?"_ Wash asked. "Impressive."

"I was trying to avoid all the--the women in the street," Simon insisted.

Jayne snorted. "What good are they if you just gonna go around avoidin' 'em?"

"Jayne, we're in public. See to your mouth," Zoe said, climbing into the front of the mule.

Kaylee spoke up, her voice strangely tight. "Don't see that you had to go that far out of your way to get by them."

"I--it was--they were being--pushy." God, he was as incoherent as a teenager.

"Ahh," Wash said earnestly. "They just couldn't resist your pretty face, was that it?"

"More like his pretty wallet," Jayne said. "If'n I dressed the way Doc does, I'd have 'em lined up for me, too, think I was some kinda _gui kwai dongxi."  
_  
"Somehow, I don't think it's your clothes that put women off, Jayne..."

They clambered into the mule, and Kaylee managed to get Simon wedged between Jayne and the railing. She was so pretty when she was passive-aggressive. Wash coaxed the engine into life and they lumbered out of the towards where Serenity was parked.

"What I'd like to know," Simon said conversationally--or tried to, but the noise of the overworked engine shrilling and grinding under their combined weight forced him to nearly shout-- "is why there were so many of them, in a town this small."

"So many what?" Wash said.

"I think he means the whores," Jayne said.

"The what?"

"THE WHORES!"

"What about the whores?"

"He wants to know how come some pokey town like this's got 'em crawling out the goddamn windows!"

This was why Simon occasionally considered taking a vow of silence.

Zoe said something, but it was swallowed by the engine noise; none of them even tried to speak again until the mule died about a hundred yards from the ship, and after that they were busy porting the day's shopping into the hold while Wash and Kaylee tried to fix the overworked machine. Simon thought he heard Wash apologizing to it. By the time they were all back on Serenity for the night, he'd quite forgotten the thread of the conversation until Zoe reappeared at the infirmary door with a packet of needles. "I think you dropped this in the hold," she said.

"Oh--thanks." He took the needles but she didn't leave. "Is there, uh, anything else?"

"You were wondering why this moon has so many ladies of leisure?" she asked.

Ladies of leisure--that was a new one. His father used to use that one for his coworkers' trophy wives. "I was just thinking out loud," he said. "It's nothing important."

Zoe folded her arms and leaned against the corner of the door. "There used to be a uranium-enriching plant on this moon," she said. "Fuel got pretty tight during the war and the Feds didn't want the Browncoats to get the station. They came in and started conscripting all the menfolk--dragging them out of their homes in the night if they had to. The ones what didn't want to join up ran for it, got in touch with the Independents. Independent command promised them air cover and backup if they laid in on the feds during the night."

She paused. Simon found himself waiting for her next words. He eventually prompted her--"What happened?"

"They attacked. Didn't realize the Feds were guarding the station with the local conscripts. And the backup--oh, it showed. One broken down gunship that wiped out the whole refining operation when the Feds brought it down."

And Simon could see it in his mind's eye, melded together out of movies and newsreels and boyhood games--neighbors and friends and relatives shredding each other in a hail of bullets, the toxic flames of the burning refinery. "And that's why all those women...?"

"Got to put food on the table somehow," Zoe said, "and work ain't exactly plentiful now that the refinery's gone."

"The Alliance never rebuilt it?"

"Don't seem to think it's cost-effective."

She left him there, still holding the packet of needles, replaying every painted face he'd seen on a corner, a porch, a balcony. The broken teeth and thinning hair, the cheap makeup and stained lace, the boney fingers and the yellow tinge to the whites of their eyes--had those smiles been forced? Had those leers been rehearsed? Or had they been at this so long it was not longer difficult?

"Not so strange," River said, jarring him out of his thoughts.

"What's not strange, meimei?" he asked. She was lurking at the edge of the infirmary door; it looked like she'd braided some of Kaylee's colored wire into her hair. She was looking at him, though, with the huge solemn eyes that might not mean anything anymore.

"Everybody does it," she said, leaning against the wall and canting one hip out obscenely, like a skinny parody of the whores in town. "Everybody's got to eat."

"I don't know what you're talking about, River."

"Dinner's ready," she said, and slipped away.

Simon looked around Serenity's infirmary, the blank surfaces all overlaid with a fine layer of dinge, the half-empty cabinets and the aging diagnostic tools. He looked at himself, at his Core-bought clothes, at a fraying thread on his cuff that he'd noticed that morning and promised himself he'd trim off later in the day. "I don't know what she's talking about," he muttered aloud, and finished restocking the supplies before he headed up to the galley.


End file.
